Bernard Lietaer's Site Launched

And speaking of alternative currencies, Bernard Lietaer -- the man who introduced a great many of us to the inequities inherent to a monopoly currency system and the great possibilities for complementary alternatives - has finally launched a comprehensive website about his work. Above, the TEDX Berlin talk, currently on his front page.

This is a great one-stop shop for a total mind-shift on how money works and how it could.

• [Anonymous]

  I think we had something like that in Germany.
  It was called Wechsel which could be redisconted at the Bundesbank or beeing used to pay your suppliers.
  http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsel_%28Urkunde%29
  Somehow the system was stopped. It used to be important for the Mittelstand.

  Shrinkhead

• [turn_self_off]

  so the problem is that money pools at the slow end (90 days vs 30 days) and his suggestion is a second currency when his problem with the banks seems to be basically the same as with micro-finance. Color me unimpressed.

• [turn_self_off]

  And after some quick checking of his page he seems to have the basics down, but is off target about what happened in brazil.

  Its is not that the complementary currency was the trick, but it acted as a local stand in for what really is needed. And that is that the government take back control over the money creation from the banks! Basically, what he described here:

  http://www.lietaer.com/2010/09/is-a-community-currency-just-another-welfare-system/

  is basically the solution to the economic issues given here:

  http://www.monetary.org/lostscienceofmoney.html

  except that rather then introducing another currency, and so muddying the water about what is actually going on, the book in the latter link goes right to the heart of the problem.

  Basically, the local currency got “printed” into existence by (local) government use (paying for the service of trash collecting and sorting) and then gets removed later on via tax payments. One do not need secondary currencies for this to work, one need politicians that are willing to stare the banking bear in the eye and tell him to get lost.

  Inflation rate to high, reduce government spending and/or raise tax to remove some money from circulation. To low, do the reverse.

• [happenchance]

  I’ve been thinking about Community Currencies for a while… I wrote some of it down a few weeks ago, you can read it here on Google Docs (it’s probably quite amateurish, but I’m just starting to flesh out the mechanics of the system):

  https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IlqcO_wjR6DRDWraF0EAIsz4-6U4L5LeMZjQjPjyfrc

  Any comments on the document are welcome.

• [simonbarsinister]

  A link to the site would be nice.

• [Broken Window]

  There is a reason, why governments don’t want competing currencies. Same reason, governments don’t like competing post offices, railroads or schools. It’s not efficiency. If they would accept competition, the government would lose the competition and it’s control over those services. If the competing currencies would take over, governments could not control the prices and collect tax via inflation. At the moment, the natural international money is again winning the competition against government currencies, this is why governments hate it. Just look at the price of gold and silver from last 10 years or last 40 years.